Forget Free Trade. Try Free Immigration.

Oct. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Hundreds of destitute migrants from
Africa and the Middle East died in two shipwrecks this month
while attempting to reach the shores of Italy. In the meantime,
wealthy Chinese, Indians, Russians and South Africans continue
to glide serenely to their favored European destinations as they
flee their increasingly unstable countries.

Nations damaged by the euro crisis -- Cyprus, Ireland,
Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Spain -- seem to have entered a race to
sell the right to reside in Europe. Malta offers the cheapest
path to eventual citizenship: just 260,000 euros. The small
conditions -- no criminal record, for instance -- are hardly
onerous. Even U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne
promised, while visiting Beijing last week with London Mayor
Boris Johnson, to expedite visas for China’s businessmen and
tourists, and to open all doors to Chinese students.

This eager courtship by Western politicians and businessmen
of deep-pocketed and well-educated foreigners can mislead one
into thinking that globalization encourages free and open
movements of peoples. In actuality, the shutters are coming
down, and walls are going up, everywhere.

Fresh Hurdles

Even Indian software engineers face fresh hurdles to
entering the U.S. today; they seem pampered compared with their
fellow citizens toiling on construction sites in Dubai, who in
turn enjoy privileges undreamt of by the Mexicans, described in
a shocking new book, “The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging
the Narcos on the Migrant Trail” by Oscar Martinez, who risk
everything to get to the U.S.

The “open for business” banner unfurled by Osborne and
Johnson in Beijing seems no more than a fig leaf for hard-line
immigration policies. The same week that they were in China, the
British government introduced a new immigration bill remarkable
for its ill-concealed xenophobia. The Conservative Party is
being pushed further to the right by the recent electoral
successes of the stridently anti-immigrant UK Independence
Party.

In France, the extreme-right Front National led by Marine
Le Pen is gaining ground among voters. A member of the Socialist
government, French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, has affirmed
the general rightward shift by openly calling for the expulsion
of the country’s Roma population and arguing for the extension
of the French ban on Islamic headgear. Last week, stalwarts of
the French Left cried out in anguish as Valls deported a Roma
teenager while she was on a school trip.

Greece confronts, in addition to a failing economy, the
viciousness of the anti-immigrant party Golden Dawn. After an
election campaign marked by competing promises to thwart
immigration, Australia has a conservative prime minister
determined to send boats carrying asylum seekers back to where
they come from.

Even countries that host the international diaspora of the
rich are inwardly seething. This month in Hong Kong I was amazed
to hear, in several different conversations, a word now commonly
used by local residents to describe mainland Chinese in their
midst: “locusts.” Singapore, the new magnet for the plutocracy
of China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Philippines, may be set
to replace Switzerland as the capital of wealth management with
its deregulated banking system. But it will have to reckon with
rising local protests against steeply growing inequality, rising
prices and visceral loathing of flashy Chinese in Ferraris.

Given the darkening anti-foreigner climate in Europe, the
Chinese and Indian plutocrats furiously buying villas, palazzos,
chateaus, haciendas and apartments in London’s Mayfair cannot
feel certain that their arrival won’t provoke their rich
neighbors to mutter, “There goes the neighborhood.”

Unreasoned Hostility

When even itinerant individuals with ample skills and
wealth provoke racial anxiety, less fortunate migrants cannot
help but incite wholly unreasoned hostility. This politically
volatile distrust of foreigners in high-income countries is
another side of the problem of unregulated mobility I discussed
in my last column. While still-developing nation-states such as
India and China hemorrhage wealth and talent, politicians in
advanced economies seem far from honestly accepting their need
for migrants of all kinds, and the related imperative to fight
blind prejudices and ill-informed notions about migration.

One well-sourced analysis after another has disproved
popular ideas about immigration as a further drain on public
resources during a time of fiscal austerity. Foreign arrivals
contribute about as much in tax revenue as they receive in
benefits, according to a report in June from the Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development.

The economic rationale for migration is further underscored
by the changing profile of high-income countries: high wages;
slowly growing, if not declining, populations; and shortages of
domestic talent. Some of the walled-off countries are slowly
seeing the light. South Korea, for instance, has started to open
its doors to immigrants. On the other hand, Japan, with its
severely restrictive immigration policies, continues to suffer
conspicuously from a shortage of unskilled workers in the
construction, medical, social welfare and other service sectors.

Indeed, as the OECD report warns, countries that fail to
understand the effects of immigration may end up crafting
policies that make it harder for them to deal with demographic
changes. Yet cynical domestic politicians, in the U.K. as well
as in France, have stolen the initiative in defining the costs
and benefits of migration.

Their opportunistic demagoguery relies upon a lack of
enlightened global consensus about the subject. What defines
globalization today is the mobility of human beings as much as
that of capital and goods. But there is no sustained attempt to
draw up a global or regional framework of principles governing
cross-border flows of people, even by institutions such as the
World Trade Organization, which lays down the rules governing
the international trade of goods and services, or the
International Monetary Fund, which concerns itself with the
stability of the international monetary system and global
capital markets.

Globalization Paradox

At present, individual countries that receive (and send)
migrants make policies in response to local needs and sentiments
(xenophobia prominent among them). There is no multilateral
process that subjects migration flows to global rules and
standards. In his recent book “The Globalization Paradox:
Democracy and the Future of the World Economy,” the economist
Dani Rodrik writes that leaders seriously committed to boosting
incomes equitably around the world should “focus single-mindedly on reforming the rules that govern labor mobility.”

Rodrik proposes a “temporary work visa scheme” in rich
countries that could generate $360 billion annually for the
world economy. Its potential benefits are greater than all the
gains from removing tariffs and subsidies (what the negotiators
at the Beckettian Doha Round of trade talks endlessly toil
over), and would go directly to the poorest people on earth,
skipping altogether the arduous and plainly inefficient process
of trickle-down.

Rodrik is, of course, aware of potential objections and
hurdles to his idea, and carefully pre-empts them with an
additional set of suggested policies. Immigration, he also
knows, lacks a large domestic political constituency. But, as he
argues correctly, so did trade liberalization, which was pushed
through by a combination of political leadership, lobbying by
business groups and activist economists.

A global institutional framework for migration could
regulate low-cost labor as well as the so-called “talent
elites” while ensuring the rights of irregular migrants. It is
simply astonishing the degree to which we have ignored the
patterns of international migration, despite their deep links
with human welfare and political stability everywhere. We
urgently need a global set of rules for migration. Certainly,
the incentives for it have never been clearer, as awful human
tragedies occur off the coast of Europe, and right-wing
nastiness spreads across the continent.

(Pankaj Mishra is the author of “From the Ruins of Empire:
The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia” and a
Bloomberg View columnist. This is the second of two essays about
brain drain in Asia. Read Part 1.)